Using Graph Theory to Understand Security

Information security is hard. It must be, because we keep getting hacked. One aspect that makes it so difficult is the level of complexity that exists in even a modestly-sized digital infrastructure. Humans can consider only so many security relationships, trust boundaries, and attack scenarios at once. This complexity makes it hard to decide where to focus our defensive resources and we're regularly led astray by the latest shiny tool or security advisory. Remarkably, our adversaries actually have a similar challenge: once a digital intruder gains a foothold in an environment that is completely new to them, how do they know what next steps they should take to efficiently achieve their goal? The environments they attack are not only complex, they are also unexplored landscapes that must be mapped out.

This is where graph theory can lend a hand. Several open source tools, such as BloodHound and Infection Monkey, provide intruders (whether that be your friendly neighborhood pentester or your adversaries) with easy ways to map out infrastructures and identify the quickest path to your crown jewels. While this is certainly alarming, we can also use these tools ourselves to find out what our infrastructures look like in the eyes of an attacker.

In this talk, Tim will provide a brief introduction to graph theory, show some demos of the free tools that use it, and discuss how he is using these techniques to build automated threat models "at scale" to make defenders' lives easier.

Speaker: Timothy Morgan

After earning his computer science degrees (B.S., Harvey Mudd College and M.S., Northeastern University) and spending a short time as a software developer, Tim began his career in application security and vulnerability research. In his work as a consultant over the past 14 years, Tim has led projects as varied as application pentests, incident response, digital forensics, secure software development training, phishing exercises, and breach simulations. Tim has also presented his independent research on Windows registry forensics, XML external entities attacks, web application timing attacks, and practical application cryptanalysis at conferences such as DFRWS, OWASP's AppSec USA, BSidesPDX, and BlackHat USA.

For the past three years Tim has been building an innovative new risk-based vulnerability management product (DeepSurface) that helps his customers gain a much deeper understanding of the complex relationships present in their digital infrastructures. Visit kanchil.com to learn more about Tim's latest R&D effort.

Hi campers! We'll be having our Tuesday meetups at Simple. This is a laid back study/networking session. Bring your laptops and questions. All levels of experience welcome. www.freecodecamp.com

Please RVSP on meetup.com so we can get a headcount

Hi campers! We'll be having our Tuesday meetups at Simple. Like our previous meetings this is a laid back study/networking session. Bring your laptops and questions. All levels of experience welcome. www.freecodecamp.com

Please RVSP on meetup so we can get a headcount

Join us for Safety First PDX's Spring 2017 workshop on Codes of Conduct. Whether you're looking for a primer or a refresher, Codes of Conduct play a key role in diversity and inclusion, particularly when it comes to the tech community.

The workshop will cover: * What a Code of Conduct is and why we need it * Examples of common problems that you'll have to deal with * Incident report handling and practice * Strategies for responding and resolving problems effectively

Safety First PDX is a Stumptown Syndicate program promoting community safety and accountability in PDX tech and beyond. Safety First is led by Audrey Eschright, co-author of the Citizen Code of Conduct (in use by Open Source Bridge and various other communities). Audrey has five years of experience on code of conduct implementation and enforcement for open source projects and events and spent ten years organizing tech community spaces, including user groups, open source projects, and conferences.

PLIBMTTBHGATY is a lightly-structured party where people get together and work on a project in a new programming language, either with or just near each other.

RSVP - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pdx-women-in-tech-pdxwit-happy-hour-networking-event-tickets-31788356831

Join us for happy hour at Simple to celebrate community!

PDX Women in Tech is proud of our community so we are honoring it as the centerpiece of our February 2017 event. This month’s theme is about loving your communities–the diverse, varied, overlapping communities we exist in. We will hear from two lightning speakers whose lives revolve around building community, and our conversation prompt will be asking each other why community is so important in our lives.

While the event is primarily intended for networking, we will have a short segment at 5:30 to share important announcements and showcase women in our community who are doing great things.

Introduction to Simple, including what they do and what jobs they are trying to fill.

Meet entrepreneur Deena Pierott, the founder of iUrban Teen and a White House Champion of Change in the Obama administration.

A talk by Allison Krug, a Technical Community Manager at AppNexus and yoga instructor, whose passion is building community both at work and in her spiritual practice.

Remember, throughout the event we will have an activity table for people who want to create during the event. This is a fantastic way to meet others if large groups are not your thing.

RSVP - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pdx-women-in-tech-pdxwit-happy-hour-networking-event-tickets-31788356831

PDXWIT is a community-based non-profit organization. Our purpose is to strengthen the Portland women in tech community by offering educational programs, partnerships, mentorships, resources and opportunities. We are unifying a supportive environment for current and potential women in tech, all of whom are committed to helping each other. Our goal is to bring together and empower women in tech and to encourage others to pursue tech careers. This is our step towards reducing the gender imbalance in the industry and addressing the current negative effects of that imbalance on women.

Trans and non-binary people are always welcome at our events.

Serverless!! So where does my state go??

Serverless Architecture is great, letting you deploy applications as independent functions that respond to events, charge you only when they run, and scale automatically.

But most applications need data, someplace. What are the best ways to connect serverless functions to stateful data?

Darin Briskman from Amazon Web Services will take a look at some of the options and best practices to using relational databases, NoSQL databases and key-value stores, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis with serverless architecture. Because functions come and go, but data is forever (or, at least until the TTL expires).

Registration is required.

Join us at the first Safety First PDX workshop on Codes of Conduct. Whether you're looking for a primer or a refresher, Codes of Conduct play a key role in diversity and inclusion, particularly when it comes to the tech community. The workshop will cover:

• What a Code of Conduct is and why we need it
• Examples of common problems that you'll have to deal with
• Incident report handling and practice
• Strategies for responding and resolving problems effectively

Safety First PDX is a Stumptown Syndicate program promoting community safety and accountability in PDX tech and beyond. Safety First is led by Audrey Eschright, co-author of the Citizen Code of Conduct (in use by Open Source Bridge and various other communities). Audrey has five years of experience on code of conduct implementation and enforcement for open source projects and events and spent ten years organizing tech community spaces, including user groups, open source projects, and conferences.

Potluck and game night for Portland Coders of all flavors. Register at eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/10th-annual-winter-coders-social-and-potluck-tickets-31309764348

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.

This will be a casual get together for women who want to hack on projects with or around other women. All types of projects (software and hardware), languages, platforms and experience levels are welcome. Remember, no experience is an experience level!

Don't have anything to work on? Come, and we'll help you find a project!

What you should bring:

• Your laptop or other equipment
• Yourself!

We'll provide:

• the space, including lots of seating and tables
• internet
• some snacks, including gluten-free and vegan options

Our goal is to support local women hackers (and aspiring hackers) by providing a safe, welcoming environment in which you can connect with and learn from each other.

We're kid-friendly, too, so feel free to bring your children with you.

Women Who Hack is open to all women (cis & trans*) and persons with non-binary genders or no gender, as well as accompanied children of all genders.

All participants of Women Who Hack agree to follow the Citizen Code of Conduct.

Questions? Get in touch: [email protected]

Our mailing list is via this Google Group. Please apply for access there, or if you don't have a Google account, please use this link to subscribe.

Simple's Data Engineering team has spent the past year and a half building data pipelines to enable the customer service, marketing, finance, and leadership teams to make data-driven decisions.

We'll walk through why the data team chose certain open source tools, including Kafka, RabbitMQ, Postgres, Celery, and Elasticsearch. We'll also discuss the advantages to using Amazon Redshift for data warehousing and some of the lessons learned operating it in production.

Finally, we'll touch on the team's choices for the languages used in the data engineering stack, including Scala, Java, Clojure, and Python.

PLIBMTTBHGATY (Programming Languages I've Been Meaning To Try But Haven't Gotten Around To Yet) is a lightly-structured party where people get together and work on a project in a new programming language, either with or just near each other.

This all started with the realization that plenty of people have a side-project in mind to work on, that it's more fun to work together, and that many of us are just waiting for a good excuse to get started.

See the main website for more information, or Eventbrite to RSVP!

Corvallis, OR based BigML team has been working for the past four years to democratize machine learning in the cloud – making it more consumable, programmable, and scalable. The net result is an intuitive platform that can be leveraged equally by business analysts, developers and data scientists who are eager to perform a variety of predictive analytics and machine learning tasks.

In this session, Poul Petersen, Chief Infrastructure Officer at BigML (MLSaas company), will talk about machine learning in the cloud (basics of decision trees, ensembles, association, anomaly, clustering) and how past is predicting the future and is now easier and more accessible than ever thanks to converging trends of open source technologies, cloud-based computing and a growing ‘big data' imperative.

How does your marketing department measure success? Which metrics are the most important indicators of if you're optimally serving your business? How were these KPIs selected? And are they still relevant to your business objectives?

If questions like these keep you up at night, the TAO Marketing Committee has wrangled up the top tech marketing minds in Portland to discuss how their departmental KPIs feed their organizational objectives. They'll recommend strategies on KPI selection and give in-the-field testimonials of their successes and failures. Questions are encouraged so come prepared!

Panel:

Chris Fisher, Senior Director of Marketing at Tripwire Chris comes to the TAO panel through Tripwire, a cybersecurity company located in downtown Portland. He is an accomplished marketing leader who thinks creatively and analytically to drive growth. His focus on data-driven marketing that delivers measurable outcomes fuels online marketing strategies to build brands and maximize user experience. He comes to Tripwire after decades with Tektronix and PacifiCorp focused on demand generation, brand awareness, and content strategy.

Hillary Ervin, Director of Demand Generation at Navex Global Hillary comes to the TAO panel through Navex Global, a compliance software leader in Lake Oswego. She is a successful thought leader in all aspects of demand generation. In the digital sector, she blends her experience in lead generation and demand generation to fuel corporate growth and brand awareness. Her decorated history at Tripwire resulted in rapid international market growth and she is an influential part of the Oregon marketing community.

Ken Anderson - VP of Marketing at Smarsh Ken comes to the TAO panel through Smarsh, a Portland firm delivering cloud-based archiving solutions for the enterprise. He is responsible for the implementation and execution of strategies surrounding a wide range of areas, including product marketing, sales enablement, demand generation, analyst relations, corporate communications, and web + social media programs. His past with in professional sports will lend an extra dimension to this panel and we will all benefit from his tech marketing insight.

Kathy Stromberg - VP of Marketing at Webtrends Kathy comes to the TAO panel via Webtrends, a Portland-based company offering web analytics, measurement, testing, and more. She is a passionate tech marketing executive with proven track record of success. Her career has been built on business growth, driving down costs, and improving critical processes to deliver competitive market positions. Whether at Webtrends, PECI, or HP, Kathy's passion about measurable marketing makes her a perfect fit for this panel.

Moderator:

Dan Cacacungan, Senior Director of Strategy and Planning at Babcock & Jenkins As a strategic thinker for businesses of all sizes, Dan believes that the best brands are built on a common understanding and common cause shared by businesses and their customers. Wielding that belief, he has helped icons like NASDAQ, Intel, Sony and Nordstrom move from marketing to their audiences, to relating to them at every stage of the brand experience. His wealth and diversity of industry experience make him a perfect moderator for this TAO event.

Details: Date: Wednesday, Feburary 17th, 2016 Time: 6:00-8:00 PM Location: Simple, 926 NW 13th Ave, Portland, OR 97209 Price: Members $25 | Nonmembers $45

We are honored and excited to be presenting this film in our space!  

Please join us for a viewing of the film "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap"

• Doors will open at 6:30 pm 

• Film starts at 7:00 pm

CODE documentary exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap and digital divide.  The film highlights breakthrough efforts that are producing more diverse programmers and shows how this critical gap can be closed.  CODE asks: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code and how do we get there?

Join Oregon Walks, the Community Cycling Center and BikePortland.org for an evening of fun, food, drinks and CONVERSATION! This month's BikePortland podcast will be LIVE and is focused on the intersection of Technology and Transportation, moderated by Bike Portland's Michael Andersen and joined by:

Chris Smith- Portland Planning & Sustainability Commissioner, Portlandtransport.org William Henderson - founder of Knock Software and the new Ride app Mychal Tetteh - CEO of the Community Cycling Center Noel Mickelberry - Executive Director of Oregon Walks

RSVP by supporting Oregon Walks and the CCC: Donate $10 each to BOTH Oregon Walks and Community Cycling Center through the Willamette Week Give!Guide to attend. giveguide.org/#oregonwalks / giveguide.org/#communitycyclingcenter

**Are you a BikePortlander? (BikePortland.org blog member) The first ten BikePortlander's to RSVP have a free ticket reserved.

While you listen enjoy a Los Gorditos taco buffet and complimentary beer, cider and wine bar, courtesy of Hopworks Urban Brewery, Lagunitas Brewery, and Reverend Nat's.

Space is limited so RSVP through our ticket site is required! http://goo.gl/forms/76SoOcqsyz

Join Portland's tech community in celebrating the end of another year. This is a fun, free annual event where members of local user groups and their families are invited to mingle, eat and play games. This is the ninth time the event has been held and it's lots of fun every time.

This is a potluck, so please bring something yummy to share with others. If possible, label your food and whether it meets particular dietary needs, e.g. "vegan", "vegetarian", gluten-free", etc. If you'd like, tell others what you plan to bring, or see what others are bringing at https://goo.gl/VuVctH. We'll provide beverages, plates, cups, utensils and napkins.

Like games? Bring your favorites and play them with others. We'll have some tables set aside. Have an activity or contest that you'd like to organize?

Please spread the word, all are welcome. See you there!

We ask that all attendees follow the PDX Python Code of Conduct.

Hobson Lane will be doing a case study on recent work done on Hack Oregon's Behind the Curtain project.

He'll walk through several things:

• Using python sets and pandas to find relationships between database tables, between politicians and the Ashley Madison dump, and between political action committees that you'd never imagine would support each other.

• Using sklearn and TFIDF to compare committee descriptions.

• Using d3 force-directed graphs to do interactive visualization and clustering on that network of connections.

Another joint meetup with the Portland Data Science Group.

~Brought to you by Code Fellows~

Want to know who Portland companies are hiring? With more than half a million vacant high-tech jobs across the country—and with university computer science programs generating only a small portion of the candidates for these jobs—where do companies find developers? Are they hiring from code schools, and, if so, how do these developers stack up? Find out at this panel discussion, moderated by Hello World founder Dan Linn and featuring recruiting and hiring managers from some of Portland's top tech companies, including Urban Airship, Jama, and New Relic.

Tweet questions for the panelists to #PDXtechdevjobs.

Join us for pizza, drinks and a special Q&A about how to hire—or join—a dev team in 2015.

RSVP today! Attendance is capped at 60.

Topic: Series of short lightning talks. Each one will be 5-10 minutes (including questions).

Speakers: None yet. Get in touch in the comments for this meetup, contact me via email ([email protected]), use the group mailing list, or contact me via Twitter @pdxrlang I'll fill in names and titles as we get them.

We will have pizza and beers. Doors open at 6:00 pm - talk starts 6:30 pm

Hashtag for R meetups: #pdxrlang

Abstract:

The discussion will begin with a brief overview of the current machine learning landscape in R. After the introduction, we will discuss H2O, a scalable open source machine learning library. H2O has APIs in R, Python, Scala and Java, and the focus of this talk will be the h2o and h2oEnsemble R packages. All of H2O's algorithm implementations are distributed, which allows the software to scale to big data. H2O can be used to speed up machine learning problems on your laptop (as a local multicore cluster), or it can be used in a multi-node cluster setting (for example, on Amazon EC2). H2O currently features distributed implementations of GLM, GBM, Random Forest and Deep Neural Nets. H2O.ai, the company behind H2O, is based in Mountain View, CA and has a scientific advisory council comprised of very well known contributors to machine learning community: Trevor Hastie, Rob Tibshirani and Stephen Boyd, all from Stanford University.

Speaker Bio:

Erin is a Statistician and Machine Learning Scientist at H2O.ai, and the author of several R packages. Erin received her Ph.D. in Biostatistics with a Designated Emphasis in Computational Science and Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on ensemble machine learning, learning from imbalanced binary-outcome data, influence curve based variance estimation and statistical computing. http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~ledell http://www.twitter.com/ledell

Hey everyone, we're on for the June 25 PDX Legal Innovation & Technology Meetup! This month's meeting is being graciously hosted by Simple and will feature the following demos/presentations (so far):

• Yongxin Yan will present on the tech and practices behind Intellectual Property Litigation Analytics. Yongxin has a wealth of experience in natural language processing and other technologies necessary to facilitate computer-aided research of legal sources, having served as Chief Scientist at Lex Machina and a Machine Learning Specialist for NetBase.

• I (John Grant) will be presenting on the Dispute Resolution Canvas, a visual framework based on the Business Model Canvas for helping lawyers, mediators, and parties better understand the contours of a dispute and drive more effectively to a resolution.

We are still accepting speakers or workshop ideas for this and future meetups. If you or someone you know would like to give a brief presentation or demo a product related to legal innovation and technology (the definition is very broad!), please don't hesitate to contact me. We are striving to meet on the last Thursday of each month and hope to have a healthy mix of presentations, demos, and hands-on workshops for our upcoming meetings.

Hope to see you all on June 25, and please spread the word about our group. We're at nearly 100 members already and our goal is to turn everyone in the Oregon and SW Washington legal community into a legal innovator!

--John & Jason

Hack on the Internet of Things for 20 hours. SmartThings, Uncorked Studios, and our partners invite hackers, designers, and product innovators to join us to prototype products with purpose, utility, and value.

As we enter a world where every "thing" is connected, now is the time to experiment and tinker with hardware and software to create something new. We're excited to meet you and see what you build!

"No talks. You may opt to take up to 60 seconds to complain about Big Data. One paper per month, no obligation to read it."

We'll start by letting anyone who wants to take up to a minute to tell us what they've been doing with data lately.

This month's paper is Feature Selection For High-Dimensional Clustering by Wasserman, Azizyan, and Singh. Read it or don't - the goal is just to have something to start conversations. "Did you read the paper?" will do nicely.

Mention @PDXBigData on Twitter with the link to the full paper to suggest papers for future sessions.

There will be food.

This will be a casual get together for women who want to hack on projects with or around other women. All types of projects (software and hardware), languages, platforms and experience levels are welcome. Remember, no experience is an experience level!

Don't have anything to work on? Come, and we'll help you find a project!

What you should bring:

• Your laptop or other equipment
• Yourself!

We'll provide:

• the space, including lots of seating and tables
• internet
• some snacks, including gluten-free and vegan options.

Our goal is to support local women hackers (and aspiring hackers) by providing a safe, welcoming environment in which you can connect with and learn from each other.

We're kid-friendly, too, so feel free to bring your children with you.

Women Who Hack is open to all self-identified women and genderqueer persons, as well as accompanied children of all genders.

All participants of Women Who Hack agree to follow the Citizen Code of Conduct.

Questions? Get in touch: [email protected].

Our Google Group is https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/women-who-hack.

VENUE CHANGE As of 11/7, we will be meeting at Simple rather than Mozilla for this meeting!

This will be a casual get together for women who want to hack on projects with or around other women. All types of projects (software and hardware), languages, platforms and experience levels are welcome.

Don't have anything to work on? Come, and we'll help you find a project!

What you should bring:

• Your laptop or other equipment
• Your lovely self!

We'll provide:

• the space, including lots of seating and tables
• internet
• some snacks, including gluten-free and vegan options.

Our goal is to support local women hackers (and aspiring hackers) by providing a safe, welcoming environment in which you can connect with and learn from each other.

We're kid-friendly, too, so feel free to bring your children with you.

Women Who Hack is open to all self-identified women and genderqueer persons, as well as accompanied children of all genders.

All participants of Women Who Hack agree to follow the Citizen Code of Conduct.

Questions? Get in touch: [email protected].

Our Google Group is https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/women-who-hack.

Ben Kaplin is a Systems and Automation Engineer at Copious (http://www.copio.us). Come learn about the Datomic architecture and query language.

Dan Herrera will be discussing the use of Trident and Kafka to implement realtime distributed streaming computations. Please see his recent blog post for more information: http://whoahbot.com/2013/07/10/writing-trident-topologies-in-clojure.html. Dan is a Data Engineer at Simple where he builds scalable distributed data processing platforms.

If we have any energy left, let's have a group discussion about core.async at the end of the meetup.

Tim Anderson's group from PSU will present at our July meetup!

Title:
Benchmarking and Technology Forecasting using DEA in R and Shiny

Description:
The PSU Extreme Technology Analytics Group is working on developing R and Shiny tools for doing quantitative benchmarking and forecasting of new product capabilities using Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA. Experiences of working on a new package will be discussed, application area opportunities, and a demo of the R-Shiny web app will be covered.

Okay, that was a mouthful. How do we use this? DEA can be used for benchmarking a wide range of applications including schools, factories, employees, and hospitals.

A new approach for technology forecasting using DEA, TFDEA, has been developed at Portland State and allows us to predict where product technology is moving. Past applications include hybrid electric vehicles, microprocessors, LCD panels, fighter jets, and many others.

Tim Anderson's group from PSU will present at our July meetup!

Title:
Benchmarking and Technology Forecasting using DEA in R and Shiny

Description:
The PSU Extreme Technology Analytics Group is working on developing R and Shiny tools for doing quantitative benchmarking and forecasting of new product capabilities using Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA. Experiences of working on a new package will be discussed, application area opportunities, and a demo of the R-Shiny web app will be covered.

Okay, that was a mouthful. How do we use this? DEA can be used for benchmarking a wide range of applications including schools, factories, employees, and hospitals.

A new approach for technology forecasting using DEA, TFDEA, has been developed at Portland State and allows us to predict where product technology is moving. Past applications include hybrid electric vehicles, microprocessors, LCD panels, fighter jets, and many others.

At May's R meetup Rich Shepard will present on analyzing censored environmental data using the NADA package.

"Extracting Correct Information From Censored Environmental Data"

Richard B. Shepard, PhD

This will be a casual get together for women who want to hack on projects with or around other women. All types of projects (software and hardware), languages, platforms and experience levels are welcome.

Don't have anything to work on? Come, and we'll help you find a project!

What you should bring:

• Your laptop or other equipment
• Your lovely self!

We'll provide:

• the space, including lots of seating and tables
• internet
• some snacks, including gluten-free and vegan options (Simple's buying pizza for us this time!).

Our goal is to support local women hackers (and aspiring hackers) by providing a safe, welcoming environment in which you can connect with and learn from each other.

We're kid-friendly, too, so feel free to bring your children with you.

Women Who Hack is open to all self-identified women and genderqueer persons, as well as accompanied children of all genders.

All participants of Women Who Hack agree to follow the Citizen Code of Conduct.

Questions? Get in touch: [email protected].

Our Google Group is https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/women-who-hack.

Until now, nonparametric regression has been a heuristic process - fitting a surface without statistically justifiable confidence measures. With the discovery of the gamma test, there is now a mean squared error estimator that is applicable to the nonparametric case. This allows true statistical reasoning for functional relationships, even when nothing is known about the algebraic form of the relationship. The gamma test is available in R. It will revolutionize the discovery of causal relationships in data.

Wayne Haythorn recently retired from a 30 year career in software design, during which he worked for organizations including NASA, the European Space Agency, National Weather Service, NOAA, Linsoft (Sweden), and Modern Terminals (Hong Kong). He is now working to promote use of the gamma test for nonparametric regression. He is a member of the ASA and has run more gamma tests than anyone else in the world.

Daniel Fennelly will be giving a presentation for January's meetup.

Description:

We'll use the TopicWatchr R package developed to access
Lucky Sort's API to explore several features of time-series text-data.
We'll cover basic text statistics, event detection,
and term clustering for topic modelling.

About the speaker:
Daniel is a software developer at Lucky Sort Inc. in
Portland, OR. He graduated from Reed College in 2011 with a BA in
psychology.

Michael Schilmoeller is presenting on cluster analysis in R for our November meetup! Note that due to proximity with Thanksgiving, this meetup has been scheduled for a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday.

Talk Title:

Cluster Analysis in R

Description:

We will present two applications of the Agnes cluster analysis package. The first will illustrate considerations in selecting a distance metric. The second will show a technique for evaluating the size and number of clusters appropriate for representing data. Both examples are from electric power generation and transmission modeling.

About the speaker:

Michael is a Senior Power Systems Analyst with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. He holds degrees in physics and business administration, as well as a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Paul deGrandis will be speaking about his experiences building and shipping Clojure and Clojurescript applications.

For this month's meetup, Jack Horne will present on integrating R with Excel in the context of market research.

Jack is interested in the possibility of holding instructional R sessions; let him know if you might like to attend!

This meetup will be at Simple, to whom we extend our thanks for hosting.

Talk Description:

Market research simulators are often delivered using Microsoft Excel. While this software provides an enormous range of functionality, especially when combined with Visual Basic, sometimes it is not enough given either large amounts of data or specific algorithmic needs. The power of R to rapidly process large data sets and to go well beyond the mathematical capabilities of Excel can be leveraged into Excel-based simulators through RExcel.

Speaker Bio:

Jack Horne is a vice president in the Marketing Sciences Group. He has worked as an applied statistician for more than 20 years in fields as diverse as technology and communications; financial services; healthcare and drug development; biochemistry and sensory perception of foods; and consumer packaged goods.

Our August meetup will feature a talk on creating R packages, by Brian Diggs!

Creating a package in R using devtools and roxygen2

One strength of R is its built in support for extending functionality using packages. Packages have specific structure and tools built to enforce some documentation and testing; these lead to a better final product but create a higher hurdle for package creation, especially the first time when the conventions are being learned. This talk will walk through all the steps of creating a package including fulfilling the documentation and testing requirements (and options), resulting in a package that can be distributed and installed by others. A combination of standard tools as well as those provided by the devtools and roxygen2 packages will be used.

At the July meetup, we'll share projects and help one another better use R. Come in with your laptop and get started with R, hack on a personal project, or find advice for coping with your latest R vexation.

This was also the plan for the last meetup, but due to mis-communication about the availability of space at Simple, we weren't able to actually get to the fun part. Apologies to those who attended with high hopes. This month will be a proper realization of last month's plan.

Also, please note that this meeting is on a Wednesday night! This is a departure from recent past meetings, which have occurred on Tuesdays.

Regards,

Homer

Dan from Lucky Sort will tell us about how they use Clojure and their experience using it for serious Java interop. As always, pizza and drinks will be provided by Simple.

Kevin Lynagh will talk to us about data-driven web applications with ClojureScript:

A web page or application is, at its core, just a visual representation of data that people can read, look at, and manipulate. Typically the mapping between the abstract data and elements on the screen is implicit in the code: take some piece of the data, do X here, do Y there; when the user clicks on that thing, modify the page here, and so on.

Reasoning about such code is difficult: either control is inverted across many different callbacks with complected concerns, or one must endure a great deal of ceremony with models, controllers, view models, and views/templates to structure an application. Ideally when we build a web application all we should have to do is describe how our application's data should be represented on the DOM. We shouldn't need to worry about callbacks, twiddling the attributes of particular elements, or updating cached state.

As it turns out, ClojureScript's rich data structures and semantics allows us to easily write such simple, declarative code. I will discuss these ideas using examples from visualization-rich dashboard applications.

Recommended reading:

C2: http://keminglabs.com/c2/
Knockout.js: http://knockoutjs.com/
Rich Hickey's talk on the benefits of immutability: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey

Soren Macbeth will present on Cascalog and Storm for batch and real-time data processing and machine learning in Clojure.

If you've been meaning to play around with Clojure but never got around to it, you won't want to miss the April meetup of Clojerks. We are going to cover installing Clojure, configuring your editor, using the REPL and building your first Clojure project.

There will be just 1 talk at this meetup. Thanks to Simple for hosting again!

Speaker: De'Mel Mojica

Propensity Score Matching (or “matching” as it’s commonly called) has gained in popularity among methodological circles with its rather parsimonious set of modeling assumptions and relative efficiency.  This talk will briefly introduce users to the basic ideas behind its application; provide an overview of “Matchit” a popular R package that employs matching techniques to broad set data scenarios; and (if time allows) demonstrate its usefulness with a test case.

Alex will go over some of the interesting things from Clojure/West.

There will be 2 talks this March! The R meetup is returning to Simple, to whom we extend our gratitude for hosting. See below for speakers and talk descriptions.

Mike Psaris

This talk will cover some of the functions and packages used to import data into R, and present some of the ways to perform analysis on stream temperatures throughout the Columbia River Basin.  Includes a discussion of some of the packages to incorporate into future work, such as plyr and snow. 

Cameron Bracken

Dynamic report generation is an integral part of statistical analysis.  When you think of dynamic report generation you might think "Sweave" but Sweave is only the beginning of the tools now available in R.  Dynamic report generation in R started with Sweave about 10 years ago but has evolved considerably since then. This talk will cover the origins of Sweave and current extension packages such as cacheSweave, pgfSweave and weaver, as well as other approaches such as brew and the all new and possibly end all knitr package.

A meetup in Portland, OR for people who use the Vim text editor to share tips, knowledge, and various other things they find useful in their daily writing of whatever.

The first meetup will occur in Simple's office where there will be:

• VimScript and why it's not that scary
• other proposals are welcome!
• or I'll just talk about Fugitive.vim and stuff

Please e-mail [email protected] for questions/comments.

Jim Loring and Josh Reich, respectively, will be giving February's talks. See the tentative talk descriptions below. This will be our second meeting Simple; our last one was quite successful!

Thanks to Simple for hosting!

Jim Loring, National Park Service - "Water Quality in R - Revisited"

An example of water quality analysis using R. Using data gathered from Issaquah Creek near Issaquah, Washington and Johnson Creek in Portland, Jim will discuss the context in which the data was gathered, the R algorithm used, an interpretation of the results in the characterization of Issaquah and Johnson Creeks. The presentation illustrates a basic application of R in the management of natural resources and is a continuation of a R Talk given last October.

Josh Reich, Simple - "An Introduction to Machine Learning in R"

Josh will cover k-means, KNN, kernel methods, LDA, rpart & SVMs. A good introduction to techniques geared towards either those new to R or ML, which will draw heavily on material from EOSL.

Josh Reich will be presenting on the data.table package!

Additionally, Simple's Director of Research Allen Goodman will be giving a talk on time series analysis:

"From a statistical perspective, the analysis of time series hasn't dramatically diverted from the program established by George Box and Gwilym Jenkins in 'Time series analysis: Forecasting and Control'. However, from a computational perspective, statisticians haven't adopted best practices for model identification, parameter estimation, model diagnostics, or forecasting. I'll model a time series using the Box-Jenkins program in R, outlining contemporary attitudes within the R community on the subject"

Join us Saturday, June 14th for the 2008 Pearl Pub Pedal, where we will be visiting each of the Pearl District breweries while enjoying special savings on some of the world’s best beer! The event will begin at 1:00 pm at the new Deschutes Brewery located the corner of NW 11th Ave. and Davis St. We will then continue to Bridgeport for $2.75 pints before concluding the tour at Rogue, where pints will be once again offered at reduced prices.

The 2008 Pearl Pub Pedal is proudly sponsored by Pdx Pedicab, UrbanDrinks.com, Neighborhood Notes, and MapClicks.com. Pdx Pedicab will be on location to offer transportation between each of the breweries, making this event a true Portland experience.

If you plan on attending, please RSVP at
http://www.urbandrinks.com/PubPedal